Perpetrating Powerpoint

Forgive me oh Lord for I have sinned...

Wait, wrong venue, though forgiveness is still in order. RantWoman responded recently to a request for the Powerpoint presentation that RantWoman's brilliant panel gave at the Super Duper Powerpoint Festival.

RantWoman is in fact relieved to be asked for a new copy of the presentation. The file used for the presentation had two different custom shows. The slides were listed in a completely different order than they were presented. The two custom shows were sort of divided into visuals and text of outline, in contrast to the flow of the live panel, RantWoman figures people reading the slides as a document might in fact like to see the basic outline.

RantWoman finds herself thinking maybe the Smart Art she never could quite adjust to please her readability preferences could at least have involved some animation, this despite the fact that the presentation wound up getting saved in an earlier version due to being shared across multiple computers as part of the team process.

RantWoman did many things to clarify and clean up. Rant Woman annotated in response to audience questions. RantWoman rearranged the slides to reflect the presentation we actually gave, not just the imperfectly choreographed outline we worked with at the conference. RantWoman put a full list of project partners right at the beginning since she suspects that got bounced past a little faster than was politic in the live version, though after submitting the revised file, she realized some of the slides still had too much jargon and too many acronyms and could have been made even clearer.

Alas, despite RantWoman's propensity for, well, bitching about accessibility, her own presentation also falls short of her own aspirations as far as accessibility features. Here are the main remaining sins according to RantWoman:

--Failure to tag some visuals with Alt Text so that a screen reader user could get a description even if he or she could not see the picture.

--Publishing in a PDF. RantWoman has had mixed success herself using a screen reader for reading Powerpoint files that have been turned into pdf files, but for reasons of data stability, RantWoman published as a pdf. For one thing RantWoman also has done limited testing for screen reader readability of the alternate Powerpoint Show format. RantWoman assumes it is supposed to be accessible, but she herself cannot fully verify for reasons of personal sloppiness and also due to the fact that she has theluxury of being able to use screen enlargement and therefore likely bounding past some issues others face.

But as soon as RantWoman sees the presentation posted on the Super Duper Powerpoint festival's site, MAYBE RantWoman will post a link here and other readers can decide for themselves.